Confessions of a Yakuza Read online

  “She was lying on the ground in front of a grave with a little statue of Jizo on it. There was a puddle by it that was bright red. I was holding the umbrella, but why I was holding it I’ve no idea. There was blood dripping from the tip of it, and it was that, running down the gravestone, that made the puddle.”

  He dreamed about his wife sometimes, Toyama said. The funny thing was, they were always pleasant dreams, and his wife was always in a good mood.

  “I sometimes think, you know, that deep in her heart she was glad I killed her. I mean, would she ever have been any happier with the pipe-cleaning man than with me?”

  Toyama had been sentenced to six years in prison; when I met him he was just starting on his fourth year.

  I’d been in jail for about a year when the Dewaya boss died. He’d always had a bad chest, and we hadn’t really expected him to live to a ripe old age, but it came as a terrible shock when I actually heard that he was dead. Something more than just feeling sad. Kan-chan from Kiryu was quite concerned about me. “Pull yourself together, now,” he said. “It’s not like you, this isn’t.” Yes, it really hit me hard.

  It never rains but it pours, though, doesn’t it? And only five or six days later, word came that the woman he lived with, the gang’s “elder sister,” had also died.

  This time I could hardly believe it. The boss had already been sick, and I’d been half resigned to it, but she was only around thirty and quite healthy, and it didn’t seem possible she’d died of illness. If it wasn’t illness, then something must have happened, but I hadn’t a clue what it could be. I kept fretting about it. After a while, though, Kamezo came to visit me, and he gave me all the details.

  According to Kamezo, the cause of the boss’s death had been morphine poisoning. “The doctor came every day and injected him with pain-killers, but the trouble in his lungs had spread all through his body, and he was in awful pain, it was terrible just to see him, and in the end she gave him enough morphine to put him out of his misery.”

  The boss must have realized that he didn’t have much longer to live. He summoned Sekine—his chief brother boss —and the rest of the gang to his bedside. This Sekine was the man who started the Matsubakai, a big yakuza syndicate, and one of the most powerful men in the business. He and the boss of the Dewaya had been brothers of the same rank for years, and our boss must have felt there might be trouble afterward if he didn’t bring Sekine in to help.

  What he said to Sekine was this: “It seems I’m not long for this world,” he said, “and there’s something I want to talk to you about. When I die, I want you to keep an eye on Muramatsu here, as the next head of the Dewaya. I’d like you to help him in his career, as your younger brother—it can be a six-four relationship, say, or seven-three if that won’t do.”

  In a way, this amounted to our boss’s will, Sekine felt, so he said, “Right. I’ll do my best on my own side too to keep up the Dewaya’s good name. Muramatsu’s a man of real ability, I’m sure he’ll make a worthy successor. Anyway, you don’t have to worry yourself—I’ll look after him properly from now on.”

  This seems to have taken a load off the boss’s mind. After that, apparently, he just stayed in bed all day long, waiting for the end. The pain got worse and worse. The disease had got right into his bones, so that when he moved they crumbled—it must have been agony. The injections the doctor gave weren’t enough for him to put up with it, so he got the doctor to let him have some of the drug and had his woman inject it for him.

  In those days, nobody made a fuss about morphine and the like, and you didn’t have to be underhand about it like you do nowadays. It was only after Japan lost the war and the occupation forces came in that people began to get stuffy about drugs; before the war, you could get hold of them easily enough if you knew a doctor. That was how the boss, too, ended up becoming an addict.

  One day, when he was gradually getting weaker and weaker, he had a talk with his woman:

  “I’m grateful for all you’ve done for me,” he said. “But you’ve got to plan for the future—you’re still young, after all. Without me around to help, you’ll find it tougher going than before. You’ve got to make your own decisions, and act responsibly so that you aren’t a burden on the others.”

  Kamezo and two or three other men were by his bed at the time. They’d all been wondering what he was going to say, but what they actually heard was so sad they started crying. How could anybody have thought of treating their “elder sister” badly just because the boss was dead?...

  She liked sewing, and used to make all the boss’s clothes herself. Most of the rest of us, too, must have had at least one or two things that she’d run up for us. She was that kind of woman, so she was popular, and if ever she was sharp with someone, they’d do as she said without a murmur. And yet in the end, once the boss’s funeral was over, she went into her own room, bound her knees with a waistband, and killed herself with an injection of morphine in the thigh....

  The bosses of the other gangs there at the funeral thought it was a bit funny she’d disappeared so suddenly, so Muramatsu told the others to go and look for her, otherwise we’d all lose face. And after hunting all over the place, they found her lying there. Naturally, there was a hell of a fuss. Some of the guests said, “Why did she have to kill herself, it wasn’t as if she was General Nogi’s wife?...” Others thought she must have felt to blame, seeing as she’d been injecting the boss with morphine three times a day. Anyway, it was a sad business, and for once I actually felt critical of the boss: what did you have to take her with you for, I felt like asking him.

  But there I was, stuck away from it all in jail. So I made up my mind to serve my term properly and get released as soon as possible. I felt the boss wouldn’t really rest in peace until I’d got out and been to put some flowers on his grave and burn some incense.

  I worked really hard after that. The average prisoner would be lucky if he finished a hundred bags in a day, so I tried to do two hundred. I didn’t do shoddy work, either: the bags were all exactly the right size, with no paste spreading outside the flaps, no dirty marks on the paper. I went on like that every day for a year and a half. It made the warders begin to look at me differently. And my ranking went up steadily. Before two years were up, I was at the top of the ladder.

  In jail, they make a clear-cut distinction between the different convicts. There are five ranks. Men in the lowest rank are called “greenies”—maybe because they’ve only just got in and are still fairly fresh. From there you move up to fourth rank, third rank, and so on, and by the time you’ve reached the top, you’re a “trustie.” You start wearing different clothes, for one thing. Instead of the reddish prison uniform, you’re allowed to wear what you like, within reasonable limits. You can buy yourself a sweater with the money you’ve earned pasting bags or envelopes. You can buy underwear. And you can have food sent in.

  As soon as I’d reached the top grade, I bought some woolen undershirts and long johns. It was like going to heaven. You know—the first time a woman gets a fur coat and puts it on I’m sure she feels happy, but I doubt if it’s anything compared with how I felt when I put on my woolies. For a start, I found I could sleep really tight at night. When I woke up in the morning, my tiredness was gone. That was a real blessing.

  Why were we allowed these things? It was a reward system, that’s all. Look, they’d say—if you do your best, you can be like that man too, so take a leaf out of his book and get to work. It meant, too, that even if you reached the top grade you soon got demoted again if you slackened off or broke the rules.

  I was lucky, though—I didn’t get demoted; in fact I went one notch above the first rank, where they gave you a good conduct badge. I ended up with two of them, the only man in the whole jail wearing two at once. And I became the foreman of the workshop.

  What that meant in practice was that I acted as a sort of assistant warder. There were just two warders in charge of a great crowd of prisoners at work. One was the chie
f, the other his deputy. The chief sat high up in front of a desk where he could keep an eye on everything. The deputy spent all his time prowling around the workshop itself.

  Apart from them, there’d be one or two instructors. These weren’t officials, they were ordinary people who came to the prison every morning. And we were glad to have them. Besides teaching the men how to do the work, they brought in news from outside. Not just old news, either—they knew what had happened the day before, or the same day. According to the rules, they weren’t supposed to have any conversation with the prisoners that wasn’t to do with the work in hand. But they were human too, and they’d have been bored just talking shop. So they used to chat about this and that, in a quiet voice, almost like they were talking to themselves. And the cons would ask them questions, almost like they were talking to themselves as well. In that way, we got to hear all kinds of things. It wasn’t that the deputy warder didn’t realize what was going on, but so long as it didn’t go too far he’d pretend not to notice.

  Having been to a commercial school as a kid, I wasn’t bad at figures and keeping accounts, and it was my job to help the chief warder keep up the records. I kept track of how much each prisoner had done, how well it had turned out, etc.—all entered in little notebooks for each man. It was quite a responsibility. I mean, it all depended on me whether a particular guy went down as doing a good job or not. It gave me a kind of authority. Of course, I saw to it that none of the other men suffered, but at the same time I made sure my own pals came out ahead.

  I’ll tell you how it worked. Every month there were almost always two or three men who finished their terms and left jail—sometimes as many as five or six. Most of them didn’t go on the first of the month but on the tenth, or halfway through, and since they went on working to the end, that meant that what they’d already produced was left over. Where they were going, of course, the records in their little books wouldn’t mean a thing any more, so the stuff was up for grabs until the end of the month, when everything was handed over to whoever ran the business. So I’d add it on to the work done by my pals. It would have been too much to give all the credit to any one man, so I’d divide it up among them, a little each. It was all up to me.

  The warders knew what I was doing. But they didn’t say anything, even so. In a prison, you see, it pays to give the best prisoners a certain power. That way, I added on quite a lot for Kan-chan from Kiryu, and for Muraoka, who came in later. And I did the same for men like Tsunegoro and Namiji, who were sort of on my team. You’d be surprised at the effect it had. I mean, a man was naturally pleased to see twelve hundred envelopes written down in his book when he knew he’d only made nine hundred that month. There’d have been a fuss, of course, if you did somebody else out of work he’d done and tacked it on to a friend’s, but that never happened. Besides, prisoners only got to see their own personal records, so nobody had any idea whether other people were doing better or not; so long as the number of envelopes they’d made and the figure in the book matched, there was nothing for them to complain about.

  Anyway, I used to look after my friends in ways like that; but I helped out the warders too, in a different kind of way, by acting as a lookout for them. The warders were supposed to keep an eye on the prisoners’ movements at all times, but they were only human, and occasionally they’d feel like taking a nap. Or if they’d got a lot of paperwork on hand, they’d naturally want to get it done while they were on duty. So when I could see that a warder wanted to be doing something different, I’d say, “Here—you get on with it, I’ll stand in for you.”

  Then I’d tip off Tsunegoro or Namiji or somebody in advance—tell them that if the prison governor was coming they were to let me know before he opened the door. They were sharp lads, and only too happy to do as I said. So when the governor came along the corridor, one of the guys keeping an eye open as he worked would give me a signal.

  “The boss’s coming, chief,” I’d whisper. And the chief warder would shut his ledger, get up from his chair, and start looking around the workshop.

  “Well? Everything OK?” the governor would ask when he arrived.

  And the chief warder would give a salute and reply,

  “Everything normal, sir!”

  That was how things went, and, not surprisingly, I was the warders’ pride and joy.

  Captain Hashiba

  It must have been May 1936 when I was released. I was thirty-one by then, and it was just the time of the Abe Sada incident; I remember seeing the headlines in the papers.

  It made a terrific stir at the time—I mean, a restaurant manager’s mistress killing him and chopping off his pecker, then walking around with it in her purse—and when I came out of jail the men waiting to meet me at the gates—Muraoka and Kan-chan, and members of my outfit—they couldn’t talk about anything else.

  “You’d better look out from now on, Eiji,” said Kamezo. “With things as they are these days, next time you make a fool of yourself with a woman you won’t get away with losing just your little finger. No amount of guts is going to help you if you get yourself chopped like that!”

  “Forget it,” I said. “This is my first whiff of the outside world in four years. I don’t care whether it’s Abe Sada or who it is—any woman’ll do, so you just go and get me half a dozen!”

  I made a joke of it at the time, but the best thing of all out there in the streets was the women; whenever one went by in a kimono and with her hair all done up, I couldn’t help staring. I’d never realized there were so many pretty women around.

  So when I arrived at Ueno station I was in a really good mood for the first time in ages. I changed trains and went on to Kuramae, and was just getting into a rickshaw when I saw some soldiers with rifles on their shoulders tramping past on the other side of the road. As I watched, another platoon shouldering rifles came along.

  “Letting us see them marching all over the town, eh?” I said. “They must need something to do.”

  “I expect they’re going off for training somewhere,” Shiro said. “Because of the incident.”

  “What incident?”

  “You mean you don’t know?” he said, giving me a doubtful look.

  There’d been an army rebellion that February, he told me. A bunch of young officers had tried to take control, and Tokyo had been put under martial law; there’d been quite a flap, apparently. I looked interested and surprised, though shocked was what I really felt.

  It was the February 26 Incident, of course. In jail, we’d got wind of most things that were happening, but this time I hadn’t heard a thing; neither the warders nor the instructors had told us about it. It made me feel after all that those eighteen-foot walls weren’t there for nothing.

  When I got back to the Dewaya, I paid my respects to Muramatsu, then went straight on to visit the boss’s grave. You know, the gravemarker was already looking a bit weatherbeaten. It brought home to me how long I’d been away. I just stood there staring at the boss’s Buddhist name written on the marker, and couldn’t say anything for a while.

  As soon as I was back from the cemetery, Muramatsu said he had something to talk about and took me into the back room.

  “You’ve probably heard already,” he said, “but Shunkichi’s left town.”

  He was right, I already knew about it, but now I heard the details. There’d been a police raid while they were all hard at it gambling, and Shunkichi—who ran the joint—had skipped out and never come back.

  “That was the fourth time they’d been raided,” Muramatsu said, folding his arms and frowning. “It makes you sick.”

  “So where is he now, then?”

  “I don’t know myself. The bastard!”

  Shunkichi was no coward, so it probably wasn’t the police that had made him run. He’d never been on the best of terms with Muramatsu, and things had got worse after the boss died. I was only guessing, but that seemed a more likely reason.

  “I’m not going to go looking for him,” said Mura
matsu. “So I’m thinking of letting you have his place. How about it?”

  “If you want me to, I’ll take it on,” I said. “But is it OK with Shunkichi’s guys?”

  “That depends on how you handle them,” he said.

  I was prepared for this—I’d had an idea it might happen even while I was still inside—so I thanked him and agreed. And that’s how I got my own gambling joint in Uguisudani.

  “Are you familiar with Uguisudani, doctor?” the man asked.

  “I’ve been there to visit the Kishimojin shrine,” I said.

  “Oh yes?... They hold a morning-glory fair there nowadays, don’t they—selling the flowers in little pots.”

  “Yes, I went last year. There was quite a turnout.”

  “I rather like it myself. My joint wasn’t in that district, though, but over by the river. There used to be old mansions with big gardens and plum trees in the area, where people would bring their pet nightingales to have singing competitions with each other. There weren’t many left by my time, though.”

  “How about the gambling place—is there anything of that left nowadays?”

  “Not a trace of it. The whole area was burned down in the air raids, and the river was covered in later, so now there’s nothing but shops. Even I have a hard job finding my way around. A real shame it’s all gone....”

  In getting my gambling place going, Muramatsu helped with the funds, and Kan-chan and Muraoka both helped as well, so somehow or other I managed to get it on its feet in fairly good time. I also managed to get married.

  Her name was Omon. She was a geisha in Asakusa; we’d become lovers a while before, and ended up living together. I’d had quite a bit of trouble, though, getting to that stage.

  What happened was that her dancing teacher and her mother ganged up together to keep her out of my clutches. The mother, Tsuru, was an ex-geisha too, and she’d brought Omon up all by herself, and as she was obviously fond of her daughter she wanted to find her a good patron if she could —and live a comfortable life herself on the strength of it. That was her idea, and I suppose it was only natural, because Omon was popular as a geisha, and there’d been any number of men who wanted to make her their mistress. The thing was, though, that Omon said it was me she wanted to marry.